Washington's Spies

by Alexander Rose

  Rogers, for Clinton, was a welcome guest, he being one of the few soldiers who knew the terrain. Clinton recorded their conversation on February 8 in his diary: “[I told] Major Rogers that if he chose to join me, I did believe that his services would be such as would induce me to recommend him to gov’t & the commander in chief. [He] said that if he could get rid of the oath [of parole forbidding him to fight against Americans] he would[;] I told him he was the best judge how it was tender’d to him & if he was reconciled to coming I should be glad to receive him.”54

  Hoping to extract more cash from the other side, Rogers applied—unaware that Washington wanted him “strictly examined”—to Congress for a commission. Snatched by troopers at South Amboy, he was taken to Philadelphia, where Washington, now certain that Rogers was two-timing, interrogated him. He remained in jail until Congress declared independence, and two days later, on July 6, 1776, he was ordered to be transported under armed guard to New Hampshire—“to be disposed of as the government of that state shall judge best.”55

  Perhaps his guards wrote Rogers off as a drunken old soldier. Perhaps they were merely incompetent. In any event, Rogers escaped his captors on the night of July 8, and lay low, living off the land and covering his tracks, until the hue and cry died down. Ten days later, bearded and smelly, he stealthily clambered up the anchor chain of the British flagship in New York harbor, slipped past the guards, and magically appeared in the dining room. The surprised officers at the table welcomed the famous frontiersman gladly—a pleasant change from his treatment at the hands of Washington and the rebels. On August 6, General Howe reported to Lord Germain in London that “Major Rogers, having escaped to us from Philadelphia, is empowered to raise a battalion of Rangers, which, I hope, may be useful in the course of the campaign.”56

  Officially, they were called the Queen’s American Rangers, but were instantly dubbed Rogers’s Rangers. As part of his terms of service, Rogers—now luxuriating in the official rank of Lieutenant-Colonel-Commandant, but invariably known as “Major Rogers” (his rank during his French and Indian heyday)—insisted on appointing his own officers and choosing his own men. He’d always detested the British practice of buying and selling commissions (he could never afford to do it), and preferred the New Hampshire way of giving officer-ships to the men, no matter their background or circumstances, who recruited the most soldiers. Inevitably, his captains and lieutenants could sometimes be of a distinctly ungentlemanly hue and demeanor.57

  As one disgusted British report noted of the Rangers: “Many of those officers were men of mean extraction without any degree of education sufficient to qualify them to bear His Majesty’s commission.… [M]any … had been bred mechanecks others had kept publick houses, and one or two had even kept bawdy houses in the City of New York.” One of them, “Mr. Brandon … kept a tavern and eating house in New York” while “Captain Griffiths kept a dram Shop in the flea market [and] Captain Eagles was still more illeterate and low bred than Frazer [while] Welsh was the [least] exceptionable [since he was once] a petty constable in the City of New York.”58

  Rough they certainly were, as that horrified British officer noticed, but Rogers’s subordinates were tough and seasoned (some had served under him in the French and Indian War), and bonded to their chieftain with clanlike loyalty. In the case of the ones just mentioned, Daniel Frazer had served twenty-three years in the British regulars and been wounded at Ticonderoga in 1758; John Brandon had fought in the French and Indian War, and in Boston under General Gage; Patrick Welsh was in the Thirty-fifth Foot for fifteen years, to which he added four years as an adjutant in a Connecticut unit, and another four at the same rank in a New York outfit. John Eagles and John Griffiths, though lacking hard military experience, had made their stripes recruiting Loyalist platoons in heavily, and sometimes violently, Patriot locales. They had seen their share of street fighting and pub brawls.59

  The Americans had heard no word of Rogers from the moment he scarpered into the July night. It was only in late August that Washington discovered what he had been getting up to. In Westchester County, after his unit had ambushed a detachment of Rangers, a Continental officer named Flood searched the pockets of their commander, William Lounsbury, who had been killed in the melee. Aged about fifty, Lounsbury had retreated to a cave and heroically held off his assailants with a club before succumbing to seven bayonet wounds.60 Flood discovered “a commission signed by Genl Howe to Major Rogers, empowering him to raise a battalion of Rangers.” The officer passed the intelligence to the New York Committee of Safety, which, startled that the infamous Rogers was back in business, immediately alerted Washington.61

  The return of Rogers, and the threat that once he’d finished recruiting his Ranger units Americans would be faced with a succession of Indian-style guerrilla attacks on their vulnerable supply lines, worried Washington enough to warn Congress that it needed to sweeten the pot for new recruits. Even then, he added, “Nothing less in my opinion, than a suit of cloaths annually … in addition to the pay and bounty, will avail, and I question whether that will do, as the enemy … are giving ten pounds bounty for Recruits; and have got a battalion under Majr. Rogers nearly compleated upon Long Island.”62 He was right. By the beginning of October 1776, the Rangers had formed into ten companies, making about five hundred men, all snappily uniformed in short, double-breasted green coats with blue facings and cuffs, white waistcoats and breeches, and dark brown leggings.63 To help him, Admiral Howe donated a sloop that Rogers used for trawling the shoreline of Long Island Sound for volunteers and to launch lightning raids on the enemy from his headquarters in Huntington (he kept a sort of regional office at Flushing, as well).64

  Rogers wanted information, and was willing to pay lavishly for it. He had dozens of informers on Long Island and along the Connecticut coast willing to provide tip-offs about troop movements and naval activities. Connecticut’s governor, Jonathan Trumbull, informed Washington in mid-October that Rogers knew what was happening in “every inlet and avenue into the towns of Greenwich, Stamford and Norwalk.” “The design of Rogers,” he continued, “is from Huntington to make a sudden descent in the night more especially on the town of Norwalk, not only to take the stores there, but to burn, and destroy all before them.”65

  So, when Nathan Hale slipped across the Sound in the company of Captain Pond late on the night of September 16, he was entering Rogers’s den. One of Rogers’s numerous informers in Norwalk had noticed the presence of Pond’s Schuyler in port, as well as the arrival of two men, both army types, only one of whom departed quietly in the night with the sloop while the other, Sergeant Hempstead, headed westwards back toward American lines. Having also been alerted by a lookout on the Long Island side that two rebel vessels—one named Schuyler, last seen berthed in Norwalk—were in the vicinity of Huntington, Rogers had shrewdly suspected that a man was being transported across the Sound. But he received the intelligence a little too late, which explains why he and his Rangers were aboard the warship Halifax when it nosed around Huntington a few hours after the Schuyler and Montgomery had hightailed it. Rebuffed in his attempt to capture the spy in flagrante delicto, an annoyed Rogers was forced to cool his heels aboard the Halifax all day on Tuesday, September 17.

  Hale, a Connecticut Yankee in the midst of King George’s army, must soon have heard that Howe had begun the invasion of Manhattan and that Washington was abandoning New York. Instantly, the raison d’être of his mission had vaporized. Should Howe succeed in storming the island and taking the city, he would drain Brooklyn of men and materiel and funnel them into Manhattan, thereby leaving Hale to spy on only the newly deserted fortifications and emptied barracks of Long Island. There was nothing for it but for Hale to hasten westwards the fifty miles to Brooklyn, gather whatever information he could along the way, and then try to reach the American lines. In his hurry, Hale got careless. He spent too much time in the open and asked too many impertinent questions of the locals. Worse still, he was an easy mark for t
he thousands of Tory refugees who had flooded into Long Island from Connecticut after being purged from their houses by vengeful Patriots. Someone, perhaps someone sitting outside a tavern or riding to Hempstead, may have noticed Hale ambling by, and recalled, with a start, that young Nathan of the Connecticut Hales had, it was rumored, joined the rebels after leaving Yale. It would not have been too much trouble to tell a passing Ranger of what one had seen. And it would not have taken too long for Rogers to elicit from his Ranger that some excited Connecticut refugee had recently spotted a known or suspected rebel-traitor wearing a brown summer suit and impersonating a New York schoolmaster.

  Though Hale had a head start on him, Rogers not only knew the ground but also did not have to worry about enemy patrols slowing him down. Then again, since Hale was alone, he could blend into the crowd if he suspected he was being tailed. Instead of disembarking at Huntington, then, Rogers, guessing that Hale would head west along the coastal road toward the city, planned to lie in wait to intercept him. At 10 p.m. on Wednesday the eighteenth, according to the Halifax’s log, “the party of Rangers” disembarked at Sands Point—a spot midway between Huntington and Flushing—and set off to hunt their prey.66

  The next day, just as Rogers had supposed, Hale was scoped traveling along the coastal road. Rogers spent the next several hours watching the innocent from afar. Was he an agent or not? He almost certainly was, but spring the trap too early, and Hale could claim a case of mistaken identity, especially if no incriminating maps or notes were found on him. Rogers needed Hale to condemn himself. All the next day, Rogers watched his quarry, and saw Hale scribbling notes whenever he saw a British detachment or passed a barracks. He now probably had enough to hang him, but he wanted to make the kill certain.

  That night, a Friday, Hale took a room at a roadside tavern and was sitting alone at a table eating supper when Rogers “happened” to sit across from him. Hale looked nervous, so Rogers made some small talk, remarking by the by on the recent battles. Soon, the two men began chatting about the war and Rogers—playing the part of an American militiaman caught behind enemy lines—complained of being “detained on an island where the inhabitants sided with the British against the American Colonies.” Hale’s interest, of course, was piqued, and Rogers took the opportunity of intimating “that he himself was upon the business of spying out the inclination of the people and motion of the British troops.” Rogers’s stratagem persuaded Hale that he had found a friend, and one who could be trusted with his secret. Amid the tavern’s unsuspecting customers, they discreetly raised their glasses and toasted Congress, whereupon Hale confided everything about himself and his mission. Rogers had hooked Hale, but hadn’t yet reeled him in; for that, he needed witnesses to his confession. As they bade each other good night, Rogers smiled and asked Hale to come dine with him the next day at his quarters. Hale enthusiastically accepted: Traveling with such an amiable companion as Rogers to New York would be pleasanter than wending his own way there.

  On Saturday afternoon, Hale arrived at Rogers’s tavern. Waiting with him were three or four men—Rangers disguised as civilians—whom Rogers introduced as friends to the cause. Rogers ordered ales for them all and together they talked of the revolution, Hale’s undertaking, and his excitement at being reunited with his beloved Alice. In the meantime, the rest of Rogers’s men had silently surrounded the inn. At last, Rogers gave the signal and Hale, openmouthed and panicked, was seized and manacled. Accused by Rogers of being a spy, Hale pointlessly denied it, but as Rogers dragged him out of the tavern, several passersby pointed him out and said they knew him as being a Hale of Connecticut and a known rebel.67

  Hale was taken to Flushing—where the Rogers maintained a recruitment office—and bundled aboard Rogers’s private sloop for the hour-long voyage to Howe’s Manhattan headquarters. Rogers said little, if anything, to his captive. For a bloodied warhorse like him, bagging this Hale, straight out of Yale with a year’s drill duty on his card, had been too easy.

  Very late on Saturday night, Rogers unceremoniously deposited Hale at the Beekman Mansion at what is now First Avenue and Fifty-first Street, but was then being used by General Howe. Hale’s execution for espionage was a formality. Howe was in the midst of orchestrating a major battle campaign and had no time to conduct a full court-martial for espionage, even if one had been required. The evidence was incontrovertible and entirely uncontroversial: Rogers had provided witnesses who attested to Hale’s declaration that he had been sent by Washington; Hale had admitted that he was an officer in the Continental army; Hale was captured in civilian clothes behind enemy lines; Hale was carrying a sheaf of incriminating documents. There was neither reason nor need for Howe to agonize over this spy.

  After Howe, roused from his bed, had sleepily signed Hale’s death warrant, he was detained in the greenhouse under the guard of the provost marshal, sixty-year-old William Cunningham, a red-haired, red-faced drunk and notorious bully unlikely to look upon traitors like Hale with much regard for their welfare. (Some months later he showed a captured American officer, Captain John Palsgrave Wyllys, his souvenir: Hale’s Yale diploma. Cunningham would be hanged in London in 1791 for forgery. On the scaffold he confessed to having caused two thousand prisoners to die by starvation and general cruelty, such as slipping poison into the food of the bolshier ones. He sold their rations for his own profit.)68

  After breakfast, it was time. Hale’s destination was the artillery park, about a mile away, next to the Dove Tavern, at what is now Third Avenue and Sixty-sixth Street.

  Hale’s hands were pinioned behind his back, and he was outfitted with a coarse white gown trimmed with black—which would be used as a winding-sheet for his corpse—over his rumpled brown suit, plus a rough, woolen white cap, also black-trimmed. A couple of guards led the way, and behind him a squad of redcoats marched with loaded muskets and fixed bayonets—in case the prisoner made a last-minute break for freedom (it occasionally happened, the spectacle of embarrassed guards chasing and tackling a condemned man being considered quite comical). Accompanying the party was a cart loaded with rough pine boards for his coffin. At the site, the noose was swung over a rigid horizontal branch about fifteen feet up, and Hale shakily climbed the ladder that would soon be kicked away for the drop. Next to the tree there was a freshly dug grave awaiting.

  At the apex of the ladder, Hale was permitted the traditional last words. His were certainly not “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country”; that phrase, lifted from Joseph Addison’s contemporary play Cato, was put into his mouth many years later by William Hull and other friends. Hull could not have known what Hale said in his final moments, though he did remember that Hale had been struck by Cato when at Yale, and that he and Hull and Tallmadge had talked excitedly of its brilliance. Perhaps he had specifically cited the “I regret” line as representative of his patriotic views, and Hull, loyal as ever, allowed his friend the posthumous privilege of uttering it.69

  What Hale really said was caught by Captain Frederick MacKenzie, who wrote in his diary for September 22: “He behaved with great composure and resolution, saying he thought it the duty of every good officer, to obey any orders given him by his commander in chief; and desired the spectators to be at all times prepared to meet death in whatever shape it might appear.”70 Later that day, a Howe aide wrote a terse, routine entry in the orderly book: “A spy from the enemy (by his own full confession) apprehended last night, was this day executed at 11 oClock in front of the Artillery Park.”

  Lynching was a tricky business. If the knot was not properly placed at the side of a prisoner’s neck (under his jaw, actually) rather than at the nape, his head would be ripped off if he dropped too great a distance, which left an unsightly mess for the guards to clean up. Conversely, if the drop was not sudden or long enough, the condemned man would be left jerking in the air as the rope strangled him. In those instances, a merciful hangman would pull on the victim’s legs before the audience started booing him fo
r being so clumsy. A perfect hanging would break the man’s neck instantly by severing his spinal cord, while leaving his head attached. In Hale’s case, his hangman was a former slave freed by the British who was unlikely to be familiar with the latest methods. As underestimating the appropriate drop was much more common than overestimating it, and being pushed off a ladder was far less sudden than falling through a gallows trapdoor, it probably took Hale several agonizing minutes to die.

  Hale’s body was left swinging for a few days, to set an example. One British officer had a letter published in the Kentish Gazette on November 9 (but dated September 26) remarking, “We hanged up a rebel spy the other day, and some soldiers got, out of a rebel gentleman’s garden, a painted soldier on a board, and hung it along with the rebel; and wrote upon it, General Washington, and I saw it yesterday beyond headquarters by the roadside.” His corpse was thrown into the waiting grave soon after.71

  The first the Americans heard of Hale’s death was on the evening of the twenty-second, when Captain John Montressor, of the Engineer Corps and an aide-de-camp to General Howe, approached an outpost in northern Manhattan under a flag of truce. His main business, however, did not concern Hale, but was to transport to Washington a letter from Howe offering an exchange of high-ranking prisoners.